Autonomous time lapse with a video camera throwie

When [Matt] came across a small video camera made to fit onto a keychain, the first thing that came to mind is a time-lapse video throwie. Like the LED + coin cell battery + magnet we’ve seen we’ve seen before (and deployed…), [Matt]’s video throwie would be deployed in interesting spots for a few days and shoot a time-lapse video until the battery ran out.

The camera [Matt] picked up has the capability of shooting video or still pictures and writing them to a microSD card. To make his camera film a time-lapse video, [Matt] connected an ATtiny45 to the camera shutter and power buttons and uploaded a short bit of code that would snap a picture ever 15 seconds.

Right now, [Matt] is having a few problems with his video throwie. When the camera is turned on, it iterates through the SD card to find the next unused file name. This eats up a few seconds, so the current setup will slowly speed up the time-lapse video. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, so we’re looking forward to the very interesting videos these tough little cameras will film.

12 thoughts on “Autonomous time lapse with a video camera throwie”

I saw something similar to this but they was using a Atmega168 (overkill) and a PIR sensor. I did how ever shrink this down to a Attiny13 and it works well but also have the same problem of it slowing down after so many photos! if needed i can post code a wiring detail!

You are right, but since this is only a small scale model (2m wingspan), it can’t “glide” properly, so it has the shape of an ASK-21 glider and has a motor to enable the flight. The camera was mounted just behind the propeller, hence the black lines shown in the video. Please forget my broken english.